Learning and Teaching Futures

Saturday, 26 April 2014

I was excited to turn to Peter Hartcher’s article
last weekend which began with the prediction of an imminent announcement of “the
most dramatic changes to the higher education sector in decades”. Exciting,
I thought, and good to see debate about what I see as much needed change in
higher education.

Australia urgently needs a plan for achieving
massive educational reform to ensure that we have a workforce skilled for the
future, not the past. With the increasing number and range of jobs moving
off-shore at a rapid rate, combined with the predicted automation of others, we
cannot continue to educate students for a world that no longer exists. Clearly,
Australia can no longer compete on the cost of labour, so where is our plan to
compete on the quality of labour? What kinds of graduates should we be
producing for Australia to be competitive on the world stage? What capabilities
do we need for the modern economy? Where is the true innovation in education
that is needed to support Australia's future?

We need to
a plan to harness the transformative potential of new technologies to support
new approaches to innovative learning centred around the development of skills
for the 21st Century. These include a new focus on creativity and innovation; fostering
higher levels of critical thinking, problem solving, decision making; collaboration
and communication; technological literacy; being a local and global citizen;
and personal and social responsibility. We also need much greater levels of literacy
and numeracy.

But reading on, the changes predicted in
Hartcher’s article are all about driving competition through “freedom and
autonomy” for the sector and expansion of the "demand-driven” system to
include government funding for both private providers and for sub-bachelor
qualifications. Presumably fee deregulation is to be part of this package. The
big question is however, what will ‘competition’ do for Australia, its
taxpayers, the students and their families? Will it drive the kinds of
educational reforms we need to produce graduates equipped with 21st
skills?

If Hartcher’s predictions are correct, our
future is likely to play out in the following ways.

Private providers (especially those publicly
listed) are likely to find the cheapest ways possible to offer Australian Qualification
Framework (AQF) compliant courses in order to make the profits their
share-holders demand. Their students are therefore likely to encounter the mass
information dissemination systems already available in the form of mass
lectures, and smaller group tutorials with little or no focus on 21st
Century skills.It’s not the ‘mass
education’ that’s the problem, it's the lack of innovation and reform in what
and therefore how students learn.

The
information acquisition aspect of learning is already easily achieved though
online lectures, books, websites, open education resources and from
peer-reviewed journals for those enrolled in a formal education system licensed
to access them. Most of these are easily accessed, right now, from the Internet
(including MOOCs). As I've said before, that being the case, any university
that can be replaced by a MOOC, should be. Universities should no longer be
primarily about acquiring and disseminating information, but should be focused
on the "what you can do with what
you know’ – can you solve problems and propose creative solutions, working in
teams across cultures for example?

Alas, Hartcher seems to have adopted the
"MOOCs as disruptive force" discourse that is so prevalent in the
media. There are well established facts about learning via MOOCs in their
current form: firstly, the experience of learning in this way is so
unattractive that only around 5% of those who enrol actually complete the
courses, and secondly, by far the greatest proportion of those who do complete,
already have a formal university qualification. Thus it is difficult to see
that MOOC providers will get far by "kicking down the doors of local
universities and offering high-quality courses at very low cost over the
Internet." Apart for these dire statistics, the most common approach to
learning (the xMOOC approach) is via videos of lectures, readings and online
tutorials. In other words, using the technology to automate existing approaches
to learning and teaching. Hardly the kind of educational innovation we need or
the "high-quality courses" Hartcher describes.

Undoubtedly some universities will double or
triple student fees. Will that extra funding result in innovation and educational
reform? Highly unlikely. The extra funding will quietly be directed towards
more research so those institutions can achieve a higher ranking in the
international rankings system.

Other higher education institutions will not
be in a position to raise fees and hence will struggle to innovate as they
compete for already scarce funds, and thus also highly likely to resort to mass
information dissemination teaching methods that are so attractive because they
are inexpensive to run.

So what will competition do for the
Australian taxpayers' $6 billion annual outlay? Very little to ensure a sound
future. Students attending the universities who have increased their fees will
get pretty much the same education as they do today, but at double or triple
the cost. The extra fees however, will mean that their university may rise a
couple of places in the ranking systems.

Finally,
I can't resist a plug for UTS as it progressively rolls out its new
campus: purpose-designed for the kinds of learning innovations Australia
needs - using a combination of the best of online learning with high
quality face-to-face on-campus learning, so that students have the best
possible experience and outcomes.We need more of this at scale!

Friday, 17 May 2013

In 2014, three new buildings will be opened
at UTS, each with a radically different design of its learning spaces. Instead
of traditional large lecture halls, and tutorial rooms with chairs and desks in
neat rows, the learning spaces in the new buildings maximise opportunities for
engaging, active learning experiences for students.

One of a number of challenges however, is
how to engage and support staff in making the significant changes to teaching
and learning required for this move. This is the focus of the Learning2014
project.

Traditional approaches to “staff
development” for higher education academics have centred around formal activities
such as Graduate Certificates in Higher Education, series of workshops on
topics such as “how to teach large classes”, specialised conferences such as enhancing
assessment, specialised journals and so on.

My experience is that these reach a small
but enthusiastic minority. So, how to engage the rest?

In thinking through an approach I have been
influenced by George Siemens (2004) Principles of Connectivist learning and
also generative theories of learning.

Academics can engage with Learning2014
through the website where there are videos explaining the links between
learning spaces and learning design, there are case studies of academics
engaged in interesting work, and a Pinterest site containing links to
interesting work in areas such as flipped learning, inquiry-based learning and
so on. Users are encouraged to annotate these and recommend others.

But access to information is not enough.
If, as Siemens’ principle notes, “Learning is a process of connecting
specialised nodes or information sources” how might these connections be
facilitated?

Several initiatives are being trialed to
facilitate these:

four academics who have been
engaged in cutting-edge learning and teaching work have been identified as
“Future Learning and Teaching Fellows” to promote connections between staff in
their faculties and to document their experiences via a blog;

a number of specialised
Communities of Practice have been established including inquiry-based learning
to “nuture and maintain connections”; and

a twitter feed to promote
establishment of personal learning networks.

Academics also have access to
Vice-Chancellor’s grants to develop aspects of the Learning2014 model.

So, how will this play out? Will support
for building connections make a difference?

Tuesday, 27 November 2012

Just one
of the strategies for the Learning2014 project (described in the last blogpost) is to provide opportunities for staff to have the experiences we are planning for our students. This post describes one such experience.

At the
end of each year, the Vice-Chancellor hosts an all-day Senior Managers Forum
which often involves groupwork (which many dread). This year, I was invited to
lead a session on “The Future of Higher Education in the world of MOOCs” and
decided to use a high-risk strategy of asking attendees to use Twitter within
their groupwork. I am told there was a reasonably high level of angst about this across the university.

In the
lead-up, I gave a demonstration to the Senior Executive on how to set up a
twitter account, how to participate, and so on. We ran introductory classes for others on 2 different
occassions, but attendance was fairly low.

In preparation
for collating the responses to the groupwork, I posted the following tweet:

Is there
an App that will produce a diagram of keywords from tweets with a common #hashtag?
#cfhe12

I
received a number of suggestions and reviewed them all, but ultimately decided to use the following tools.

I set up screens around the venue to display the general hashtag tweets for the forum using two different tools:

The
really big pay-off was in the use of Twitter to collect feedback from the two groupwork activities. Each activity
had a focus question to which they were asked to respond using a dedicated hashtag. I then
used

http://www.infomous.com/ to
display a tag cloud for the responses (one of which is displayed in the
header). At the podium, I could click on a particular keyword response and display all the
tweets related to that word.

For the
only time I can remember, the groupwork activities received the greatest praise
for the day both in verbal comments, and in the following tweets:

Participants
not groaning about groupwork. Lively debate on game changing or not
#smfuts12_gc

So, thank
you to everyone who sent suggestions on the best tools to use. They really
helped make the day a big success in terms of demonstrating the value of the
use of tools such as Twitter that many had previously thought to be of little
value. It also dramatically improved the experience of groupwork – so many people
commented that they felt their voice was not lost in the ‘group reportback'.

And finally, the majority of those who joined
Twitter specifically for the event, continue to use it.

Never has the phrase “May you live in
interesting times” been more relevant to my role than this year – UTS is in the
middle of spending over a $1Billion on its campus redevelopment just as the explosion of free, online
learning occurs. Just a few weeks ago
Minister Chris Evans was quoted in the Financial Review (3 Oct) as questioning “whether the government should
continue to fund university infrastructure as higher education moves online at
a rapid pace.” To say there was a level of anxiety in the higher education sector
would be an understatement. But, as I said in my article in The Conversation,
“any university that can be replaced by a MOOC, should be”. This blog
explores why I think UTS won’t be replaced, and how we are achieving that.

So far the following campus redevelopment projects have been completed: new student housing (720 beds); a
multi-purpose sports hall; a major refurbishment of our Great Hall; a new space
for the conduct of short courses; and major redevelopment of teaching spaces in
our faculty of Design, Architecture & Building.

But the biggest changes are yet to come.
There are three new buildings in the process of construction: The Faculty of
Engineering and IT Building on Broadway (made famous yesterday when the large crane
caught fire and the jib collapsed); the new Business School (designed by Frank
Gehry); and a new Science Building.

The first two buildings have been designed
(long before the MOOC hysteria) to maximise opportunities for collaborative
learning – there is not a single standard lecture theatre in either of the
buildings – rather there are large collaborative spaces.

This poses the significant challenge
of how to change the learning experience of students, so they experience the
best of online and face-to-face learning opportunities. We are meeting these
challenges through two projects: Learning2014 (the year we will occupy the new
buildings) and Learning2020.

Learning2014 is concerned with changing teaching and learning practices to make best use of these new collaborative spaces. Learning2020 is a longer term project to make the necessary changes to larger systems for this change in learning to occur - for example timetabling and other IT systems.

This blog will discuss these initiatives - the successes and failures :)